Tag: Police Brutality

I mean, not ‘everything’, obviously – I’m sure we all believe many, many true things. But do you ever wonder whether your deeply held beliefs, the pillars of your world-view, the informational basis around which you organize yourself as a moral or ethical member of society, as a citizen, might be wrong?

I worry about this all the time. I’m someone who, a generation ago, would have identified as a moderate conservative with liberal social values, which position today makes me pretty solidly liberal. I live in the Northeast, surrounded by other liberals, and the constant lament these days, the endless question, is:

How can conservatives believe the things that they believe? Don’t they see that their views are incoherent? That their new President lies? How can they so casually disregard science, fact, data, consistency?

I am sure that conservatives wonder the same things about liberals; I read conservative news, so I know for a fact that they do. When two opposing sides disagree about the nature of reality, when each is sure that they are correct, when they will state opposite “facts” with equal confidence and each side rejects the “facts” of the other, my question is this:

How can you be sure you’re on the right side? How do you know that it’s the other side that is deafened by their echo chamber, and not yours?

As far as I can tell, I am the only person in the country right now worrying about this. Everyone else seems very sure that they are on the right side, and they become more sure every day. Thus, the two sides grow further apart.

I’m not sure I’m right. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’m wrong. I’m sure I hold some number of beliefs which are completely ass-backwards – I just don’t know which ones.

How can you tell if your mind is open? How would you measure such a thing? I read people who disagree with me, and sometimes they persuade me: does this happen enough? Too much? If it doesn’t happen often, is that because I’m closed-minded, or because I’m already mostly right?

Whenever I find myself very sure that my side is right, I think back (bear with me) to O.J. Simpson’s murder trial. I was just a kid when O.J. went to trial, but I remember quite clearly that all the adults in my affluent and mostly-white world were sure that O.J. was guilty.

More than that, these adults were dismayed by what they saw as the shameless race-baiting of O.J.’s lawyers, which they considered manipulative and transparently false. O.J. was one of the most famous men in the country: of course the police weren’t being racist with him. Of course they hadn’t planted that glove, that accusation was elaborate, absurd. The police might have been racist in Montgomery in the 1950’s, but this was the 1990’s, L.A.: they didn’t frame black men anymore.

And I remember that they all seemed disturbed that black Americans had fallen for the cynical ploy of lawyers. It seemed credulous and paranoid to the adults around me, for whom the police were an accommodating if obstructionist presence. It seemed as if race mattered more to them (black people) than truth, as if they were willing to overlook facts in order to stay loyal to their side.

From fivethirtyeight.com: At the time of the trial, nearly the same percentage of black Americans thought O.J. was innocent as white Americans thought he was guilty.

None of these white adults would have identified themselves as racist; they would have been hurt and offended by the accusation. But it never seemed to occur to them that, perhaps, every black person in America wasn’t paranoid, that when they said that it was plausible to them that the L.A.P.D. would try to frame the most famous black man in America, it was because they were having very different experiences with police than white people. That the world, that even their own country, was much bigger than their experience.

But no one around me seemed to figure that out then – it wasn’t until decades later, when dash cam footage showed police shooting and killing many unarmed black men, that we understood how the police looked to other Americans.

I think about this whenever I hear liberals lament the blindness of conservatives, because I hear them say the same things about those conservatives that we said about black Americans: that they care more about their team than about ‘reality’. The implication is that we are superior or smarter, that we see more clearly, that ‘we’ know what reality is. I’m not sure that’s true. That wasn’t the case back then – maybe it’s not the case now. Because, sometimes, the problem isn’t whether you see clearly or not; it’s that you only believe what you see yourself, but the world is much, much bigger than what any one side can see.

So I wonder: what am I missing now? What don’t I know? What can’t I see? What are my prejudices? How can I tell the difference between when you are wrong and when I am wrong? I am sure we are both wrong much of the time, but how can I tell which is which? I’m frantic to know this, to see into the darkness of my own ignorance and error. I just need a light I can trust.

Featured Image:

Reactions to the O.J. Simpson verdict, taken from atlantablackstar.com

She meant ‘we’, ‘white people’, and, I think, when she said, ‘What should we do?’, she didn’t just mean, ‘How can we help?’ – she also intended the harder, subtler question, ‘What am I supposed to do with my anger about this? How do I understand and cope with how desperate this makes me feel, especially in light of my own complicity?’

During the winter, I go to the gym most days after work. The TVs over the treadmills are usually set to CNN, and this is pretty much the only the network television I watch. During the past few months, I have run while, each week, it seems, CNN covers another murder of a black man by the police. Lately, as we all know, there have been videos of these deaths, and I watch while these men are killed over and over and over, and all I can think, ‘We should all have known that this was happening.’

There are a number of systems failing in these videos, many policies indicted in the facts of these deaths: the expansion of police powers, the war on drugs, entrenched, multi-generational poverty. There are more evils at work here than simple racism.

But simple racism is there: there are fewer consequences for killing blacks than there are for killing whites, and police across the country have been exploiting that difference for a long time. Black lives matter, but they matter less than white lives. This is an empirical truth and a moral catastrophe.

This problem has not gotten worse recently: the police did not just start killing black men this year. The national media did not finally develop a racial conscience; white people are not more aware, more sensitive, than we were in 2005. So what changed – why are we talking about this now?

Because now there’s video.

Everyone has a camera now, smartphones which feel like an extension of their arms, and their own personal social media platforms. The situation is exactly the same, but now there’s proof.

I feel crushed by this fact: black Americans have, for decades, insisted that they were the victims of police brutality. Most white people didn’t believe them, and even those of us who did, who believed that, yes, stop-and-frisk was racist, that blacks were systematically harassed by police, we didn’t imagine, didn’t really understand, that they were being routinely murdered by the police.

At least, I hope we didn’t. Because the other possibility is that we did, and we just didn’t care.

But they were – they were being killed by the police, and we might have done something about it much sooner if only we had believed what we were told. Unfortunately, and indisputably, the word of the black community is insufficient: they must have video corroboration, even in cases of their own deaths.

Truly, we had no good excuse for not believing the charges of racial violence made against the police. In the entire history of black-white relations in America, every single time a system could victimize or disadvantage blacks, it has. After slavery, after Jim Crow, after civil rights, when the black community said, ‘We’re scared of the police,’ where on earth did white people find the gall to disregard them?

It’s well past time to accept this: black Americans and white Americans occupy different countries. Our experience does not delimit theirs, and the fact of the difference in their experience is not grounds for us to dismiss it. It’s time for the white community to treat the testimony of black Americans as equal to their own.

If we had, perhaps we would not still live in a country where racist drug laws provide a thin cover behind which cops arbitrarily torture and execute an unknown number of black men. If we had had a little moral imagination, we might have stopped this a long time ago – instead, we needed to wait for it to come out on video before we would even start talking about it.

So what should we do?

Here’s what we can do, for a start: the next time a black person tells us, ‘I can’t ever get a cab’, ‘They won’t lease us apartments’, ‘They treat me like I’m only there to shoplift’, ‘I was going the speed limit’, ‘I wasn’t resisting arrest’, ‘They kill us for no reason’, we can believe them.

Here, in the United States, a police officer can kill a black man without fear of serious legal repercussion. Be the man unarmed, unthreatening, even if there are cameras rolling, a cop can kill him and walk away.

There are two problems here. The first is that cops have too much latitude to kill people. Being a cop is dangerous and important work, and so we, the people they serve and protect, have extended to them credit against our lives. We have given them the benefit of the doubt, and granted them dramatically expanded rights of self-defense. We have given them license, when vulnerable or afraid, to protect themselves and each other, with the weapons we suffer them to carry.

They have abused that privilege. They, or some too-great number of them, kill with impunity. That is outrageous, and it needs to stop. Cops should not be allowed to shoot unarmed men. Cops should not be allowed to taze non-cooperative people to death. Cops should not be allowed to choke the life out of a man, ever.

This does not mean that police should forbear while people shoot at them. If a cop believes that someone is about to pull a weapon on him, let him shoot. But, if he is wrong, and there is no weapon, then let him stand for murder. Don’t let him enjoy the protection of his fellow officers then, or the complicity of the prosecutors. And if these police killings are the work of a few bad apples, then let their brothers in blue police them. At the very, very least, the killing of an unarmed person should result in the automatic loss of a badge. Cops are citizens among citizens – let them enjoy no more protections than we.

The second problem is that the black community has disproportionately borne the weight of these injustices. This should surprise no one: the black community has been made to bear the weight of many, many injustices.

In this case, the problem is not only that blacks come under undue and undeserved pressure from the criminal justice system, but also that abuses of power which victimize blacks are less likely to be punished, less likely to be treated by the community as the outrages that they are.

The black community must contend with a police force that can harass, assault, incarcerate, and murder them – their ability to make meaningful protest is hampered by the danger the police pose to them.

The white community tsk-tsks and fails to indict – we have voted less with our feet than with our essential apathy.

And it must be apathy, for there is no excuse for disbelief. True, people tend to believe the evidence of their eyes, and the white community, particularly the white community with power, has a different relationship with the police than the black community. If I were going only by my own experience, I would have to conclude that the police in the United States are merely an armed concierge service. But they are not. And, given the overwhelming evidence, historical and contemporary, it would be absurd to doubt that the American government and populace are capable of systematically disenfranchising, terrorizing, or brutalizing black Americans.

There are self-interested reasons to care: if the police can trample on their rights, then they can trample on your’s.

But, more than that, the fact that people don’t look like you, the fact that their misfortune does not happen to be your’s, does not excuse you for turning a blind eye to a wrong done to them.

The police may not value black lives as much as white lives, but we should. What would you do if Eric Garner had been white? Would your outrage be the same? Or would it be easier to imagine then that the next person killed might be your neighbor, or son, or husband? Or you? What would you do, if you really believed that the reality that strangled him might reach out and touch you next? Would you remark how sad it all was, and then turn off the T.V.? I don’t think so.